Tag: reading

how to destroy the book

Posted on by jessamyn

I’m still sort of annoyed at Amazon’s self-serving press release about more ebooks being sold for the Kindle on Christmas Day than “real” books. I feel a few things

1. they’re creating a distinction that isn’t necessary, between ebooks and paper books
2. at the same time they’re obscuring the very very real distinction that exists and is terribly important: you do not own an ebook, you license or lease it

Plus I just plain old don’t believe it. I mean maybe it’s true for the narrowly sliced timeframe they’ve outlined but really? This isn’t a trend, it’s a blip. Want me to think otherwise? Release some actual numbers. Amazon makes more money off of ebooks than paper books. They’d like to keep doing that. So.

I’ve been meaning to link to this talk for a while, a transcribed talk that Cory Doctorow gave at the National Reading Summit in November. The title of his talk was How to Destroy the Book. I think you’ll enjoy it.

[T]he most important part of the experience of a book is knowing that it can be owned. That it can be inherited by your children, that it can come from your parents. That libraries can archive it, they can lend it, that patrons can borrow it. That the magazines that you subscribe to can remain in a mouldering pile of National Geographics in someone’s attic so you can discover it on a rainy day—and that they don’t disappear the minute you stop subscribing to it. It’s a very odd kind of subscription that takes your magazines away when you’re done [as is the case with most institutional subscriptions with Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of medical and scientific journals].

Having your books there like an old friend, following you from house to house for all the days and long nights of your life: this is the invaluable asset that is in publishing’s hands today. But for some reason publishing has set out to convince readers that they have no business reading their books as property—that they shouldn’t get attached to them. The worst part of this is that they may in fact succeed.

Do Nothing But Read Day

Posted on by jessamyn

Today is the first ever Do Nothing But Read Day. I have been remiss in not telling you about it before. While I am doing my part in that I am still in pajamas, I actually have some plans today because it’s the neighborhood Solstice Bonfire. I will swap DNBRD with actual Solstice and do my best to wear mostly pajamas and mostly read. I’ve done a decent job stepping up my reading this year when I realized that my book-reading was plummeting last year. Not a huge deal, but I decided that if reading books was important to me, I should make an effort to do it, not just bemoan not doing it. So I did. And it’s been going well. Best of luck for best of books over the holiday season and the new year.

some weekend and summer reading

Posted on by jessamyn

Summer starts this weekend which means some people decide it’s time to read books. The main impetus is kids out of school, but there are also teachers who have summer “free” to read books as well. Many media outlets make their summer reading lists and other bloggers collect them. Here are a few links that I find worthwhile about summer reading, but when I make my list, I’m just going to look at the towering stack of both unfinished and not-yet-started books that always graces the table by my kitchen table.

I was going to include links to state libraries’ summer reading programs but it looks like a lot of state libraries either don’t have statewide summer reading programs or don’t advertise them well. If you have a library summer reading program you’re fond of, please put it in the comments.

And a special “Hey nice job” to a colleague of longtime reader/contributor Eoin Kelly whose coworker Rosemary Hetherington was awarded the Children’s Books Ireland award which recognizes “outstanding contribution to the world of children’s books.” There’s a nice writeup on the CBI page. Congrats Rosemary!

“needing the stupid things” Luc Sante on the book collection that devoured his life

Posted on by jessamyn

Luc Sante is profiled in the Wall Street Journal talking about his book collection and its relationship to his space and his sanity. I’m not sure I’ve ever mentioned this, but I have a whole house that just sort of holds on to my books. The real explanation of why me and my books don’t live together anymore is longer and more complicated but let me just say that I know exactly where Luc is coming from and this article delights me. Don’t miss the sidebar history of private libraries.

I would very much miss books as material objects were they to disappear. The tactility of books assists my memory, for one thing. I can’t remember the quote I’m searching for, or maybe even the title of the work that contains it, but I can remember that the book is green, that the margins are unusually wide, and that the quote lies two-thirds of the way down a right-hand page. If books all appear as nearly identical digital readouts, my memory will be impoverished. And packaging is of huge importance, too — the books I read because I liked their covers usually did not disappoint. In the world of books, all is contingency and serendipity. Books are much more than container vessels for ideas. They are very nearly living things, or at least are more than the sum of their parts.

2007 reading list, a year end summary

Posted on by jessamyn

Here are previous year end lists: 2006, 2005, 2004. As you probably know, my booklist lives in a separate blog and it has its own RSS feed. I’m not a voracious reader and I’ve been heavy into genre fiction this year, but here’s the wrap-up of what I read in 2007.

number of books read in 2007: 53
number of books read in 2005: 86
number of books read in 2004: 103
number of books read in 2003: 75
number of books read in 2002: 91
number of books read in 2001: 78
average read per month: 4.4
average read per week: 1
number read in worst month: 1 (November)
number read in best month: 9 (March)
percentage by male authors: 78
percentage by female authors: 22
fiction as percentage of total: 63
non-fiction as percentage of total: 37
percentage of total liked: 89
percentage of total ambivalent: 11
percentage of total disliked: 0

It was not a good year for reading, to put it mildly. I did more travel than ever before, but I spent more time on planes either working or watching back-of-seat movies or just sleeping. Last year I felt like I got a lot of reading done on planes.

This year I also had a new time-consuming hobby which was (and is) swimming. In an attempt to meet a pretty ambitious goal — one which I did not wind up meeting, but boy did I try! — I spent a lot more free time swimming, driving to the pool, showering, etc. And then of course when you swim you sleep like a log, which means less fidgety before sleep time for reading which was a standard reading time for me. I like swimming a lot, but the impact it has on my reading is, to me, quite clear.

So, it’s interesting to do this every year to see how the years compare. I read a lot of genre fiction — six books by John Lescroart, two by Greg Bear, two by Henry Petroski, four graphic novels — and that will probably continue. I read a few books that I enjoyed but which took me weeks to work through, 1491 and Men of Tomorrow, which really put a damper on other reading. I did less parallel reading this year and more serial reading, so when one book bogged me down, I was less able to pick up something else. In any case, I believe that every single one of those books was a loaner from a friend or family member, a library book or a library booksale book and to me that’s a decent accomplishment. Happy reading to everyone in the new year.

Here are some other reader’s lists: Anirvan, Ruby.